UFOs in the daily Press:

Will an explanation come
from above — or below?

UFO investigators hope they can add information to their database

By CINDY KLEPPER
City Editor

Sometimes a mystery remains a mystery.

Roger Sugden knows that, but he hopes that, this time, it doesn't.

Sugden brought a couple of friends to Huntington Tuesday to see if they could figure out what three city employees saw in the sky the day after Christmas. All three investigators are members of the MUFON — the Mutual UFO Network — which examines and compiles reports of unusual sightings. They hope this one will add to to the accumulated data.

Meanwhile, one suggested explanation — a Christmas toy that got away from its owner — might not pan out.

The two police officers and city ordinance officer saw a large object hover above SS. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, then take off to the north, about 2:30 p.m. Dec. 26. After an account of the sighting appeared in The Herald-Press, Father John Guimond, a priest at the church, offered a possible explanation — a "Whoosh" or "Hoverdisc" that had gotten away from its owner.

While he hadn't seen such a toy near the church, he said the description fit.

"You inflate it with helium and it's about the size of a table," Guimond said. "You let it loose and it goes every which way."

The toy is circular and about three feet across.

April Strle's sons got such a toy for Christmas. The family lives at LaFontaine Street and West Park Drive, about two blocks west and three blocks south of the church — in the area where the object came into the officers' view. The boys were playing with it the day after Christmas, she said, but she thought it was later in the day.

"It was kind of light out but it was starting to get dark," Strle's son Levi said, trying to recall the time of day. He doesn't have the Hoverdiscs anymore — one popped, and the other one floated out of his sight.

"The last I saw it was at the neighbor's house," he said, pointing to a house in the general direction of the church. But he can't remember what day that happened.

Sugden and his fellow investigators, Gene White of Fort Wayne and Doug Egolf of Columbia City, remain unconvinced.

"It's not a balloon of any kind," Sugden said. "Whichever way the wind was blowing, it wouldn't have stopped, tumbled and moved off."

The MUFON trio spent most of Tuesday afternoon in town, interviewing one of the officers who saw the object and taking measurements to try to determine the size of the object.

Sugden said the description of the object's movement is not unreported in the annals of UFO reports.

"It's pretty common that an object comes over and hovers," he said. "This is not the first time that's happened — the tumbling motion, it stops, and moves off."

He wants to talk to the other two city employees who saw it, as well as to an unidentified man who reportedly spotted the object while driving on Warren Street. He also wants to obtain a sketch of the object so that he can add it to MUFON's database. And before he can classify the object as other-worldly, he has to eliminate all other possibilities — a balloon, an aircraft, an insect, or a bird, for example. The size and movement of the object have, in his mind, eliminated those possibilities.

Sugden believes there are many more unexplained visits than have been recorded — in part because many people are afraid of being ridiculed if they admit to a sighting, and in part because people don't look.

"A lot of people just look level," Sugden said. "They don't look up in the sky."

The term UFO is also a little scary, he said.

"It doesn't mean it's a flying saucer. It doesn't mean it's aliens," he said. "It means it's unidentified.

"It could be anything. The world is a little more complicated than we can perceive. We see in a tiny little spectrum."